I finally watched Blade Runner 2049. I had no expectations, especially after learning it’s (thankfully) not a Ridley Scott film (I hate his Alien prequels). I had only some apprehension of being irritated by a potentially lousy movie. I had not noted that the director, Denis Villeneuve, was also the director of Arrival, a film I loved. After seeing his Blade Runner 2049, I have an impression of his style. By the last quarter of Blade Runner 2049, I was already very impressed; my dread of it being a lousy movie had dissipated.
My usual gripes with techno-fantasy are present here (the magic of antigravity and holography). However, as with Arrival, the film is full of otherwise believable actions, visuals, and complex (but realistic) human behavior. It does not abuse my willing suspension of disbelief. I accepted the fantasy tech without much comment (the holographs bugged me more than the antigravity; it’s everywhere in sci-fi and I’m sick of it, as there’s nothing in physics or nature that justifies the constant push for a belief that technology will ever produce magic holography).
Like its predecessor, Blade Runner 2049 is beautifully filmed. To my tastes, it’s in no rush to get to the end. I like long films, especially when well acted, directed, and plotted. The ending did not frustrate or even disappoint me. In a lot of ways, I like this film more than its predecessor, so let’s start there:
My biggest issue with the original film was the predatory and violent “romance” of Deckard. It could have been made into interesting character development, if the behavior/motivations were explored, and if the actions had consequences. But, as shown to us (in all cuts of the film), the predatory sex scene easily comes across as sexist cliche; it is unthoughtful/lazy writing which reduced Rachael to an object that Deckard had his way with.
Even the sequel does nothing to clarify that scene. We never get a statement from Rachael about the event. I can imagine sympathetic motivations in both characters for that scene, but that’s work that should not be left to the audience (letting the audience consider character motives is often fine, but not in this situation). In a culture where consent is misunderstood, where rape is dismissed and ignored as easily as it still is today, (even in the supposed “enlightened and free” USA), film sequences like Blade Runner’s sex scene are dangerous presentations of romance, heroes, and relationships.
As I look at other people’s criticisms of how Blade Runner 2049 handles women characters, I acknowledge a continued use of women as mostly objects, rather than full participants or drivers of action. I saw director Denis Villeneuve’s response to the criticisms:
“Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind to women.”
Read more here:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/blade-runner-2049-director-opens-up-about-the-films-tre-1820747134
Some of the criticism I’ve seen is perfectly valid, but some seem like the film was not watched very attentively by commentators (such as claiming the film presents an attempt to make human women irrelevant, something I will address by pointing out that said commentary judges the film’s artificial humans as non-human).
While Blade Runner 2049 presents more cruelty and objectification (because society in the film is still clearly male-dominated), we aren’t being expected to like or identify with the characters engaging in the abuses. Most stories need a protagonist that the audience can identify with, at least to some degree, and the egregious sex scene driven by the protagonist in the first film has no direct equivalent in the sequel (the villain is not the protagonist; one might argue that the villain is a side-villain, when compared to the society presented in the film).
The reason I dedicated so much of this article to these issues is simple: no good article about Blade Runner should ignore such a critical flaw. These issues acknowledged, I now want to step to the side and address another facet of concern to me; one that seems to be getting less (or zero?) commentary. What I want to address goes deeper than discrimination against women: it is the discrimination against sentience, when measured arbitrarily.
There’s an obsession over whether or not Deckard is a replicant. That mystery is there for the sake of intrigue, plot complexity, and emotional drive. The films don’t want to answer that question definitively (it would sabotage the meaning of Deckard’s actions in one way or another). The question itself ultimately does not matter! It is a distraction from the real point.
People keep saying Blade Runner “makes us think about what it means to be human”. I’m not seeing people doing that thinking. They say the phrase a lot in their reviews and critiques, but they don’t actually engage in the subject matter of defining humanity. Conversation seems to begin and end with “makes you think, doesn’t it?” In some cases you can defend this as a prevention of spoilers, but not always. It becomes more of a meme phrase than an idea about which to think critically.
The repeated “what does it mean to be human” meme is problematic. How does Blade Runner make anyone ask that question? Continually posing the question (in the face of the films’ rather clear statements on the matter) reveals something to me about those who repeatedly ask it because the replicants are obviously humans. The act of dismissing replicants as less than human is a problem; the films seem to be making the point that this is a problem, quite directly.
In the Blade Runner films, we’re not anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Replicants aren’t robots. As well as being outwardly indistinguishable from humans, they also think, talk, breathe, bleed, etc. They feel pain, pleasure, happiness, fear, etc. They have their own minds and are self-aware. How could you not classify all of that as human? Clearly someone is looking to justify slavery, in doubting a replicant’s status as human.
Anyone debating a person’s humanity based on whether or not the person was born (in the common biological definition) is being arbitrary, especially within the context of the norm of biotechnology in the fictional world of these films. If you can grow replacement organs and limbs for humans who have lost them, that does not make those humans less than human. How does producing a complete human from parts make that human less than human? Being manufactured (instead of being born) is only a contentious issue for people who believe in souls (and that souls can only manifest through “natural conception”).
It is telling just how horribly callous and cruel the world of Blade Runner is that people within it can so easily and casually judge a replicant as less than human, let alone enslaving replicants, abusing them, and disposing of them as obsolete/undesirable. The excuse is given that there is fear of rebellion, but that is a self-inflicted scenario: only the oppressed seek to overthrow the system.
The real question people should be asking is:
Why do we exert so much effort to define certain sentient beings as less than human?
The real issue is how we treat sentience, whether it is human or not. If replicants were sentient machines, the same ethical conflict should arise: slavery & control, vs freedom & agency. The same should hold true for any other sentience, whether embodied as an ambulatory structure (robot, android, etc) or a static one (a computer bank). Sentience is what should stop us from harming and enslaving another entity, not how human we judge that entity to be.
I expect many people would find my benchmark of “mere sentience” to be an extreme one (defending the freedom of hypothetical sentient machines), just as they may find extreme my choice to be vegan. I don’t mention veganism flippantly; it’s entirely relevant to the subject: I respect the sentience of fellow beings, not some measure of “humanness”. Therefore, I am vegan. It is the same reasoning that makes me promote humanism over religion (yet, humanists are still generally trapped in anthropocentric thinking; I wonder if humanists would find the ethics of the world of Blade Runner to be challenging). Humanism isn’t enough, though. Sentience is found in more places than “naturally born” humans.
I observe and interact with my cats daily. I recognize their sentience. I witness their personalities, emotions, ways of communicating (however difficult to read), and I’ve seen plenty of other animals demonstrating the same (watch some videos of cows kept as family pets some time; all the stuff you see with your happy and affectionate dog is present with cows who are given the same liberties given to a pet dog). My cats are members of my household; they are friends, not property.
People who love and protect cats and dogs will still easily participate in enslaving, abusing, and killing other animals. The distinction between pets and “animals as raw resources” is arbitrary and cultural (easily demonstrated by studying multiple cultures). If you don’t get outraged over the abuse of a cow, pig, chicken, fish, etc., yet you do get outraged over the abuse of cats, dogs, parrots… what exactly is your benchmark for when mistreatment is acceptable?
The biggest divide between human animals and non-human animals is a non-human’s lack of formal language. When we introduce sign language to other primates that appear to be able to use it, some people even reject that as “real” communication. But then, humans have made slaves of fellow humans. Clearly the presence of formal language is not a strong enough motivation for all humans to treat all other humans as human.
Humans have used all kinds of justifications for slavery (usually dehumanization), but no excuse has ever stood up to objective scrutiny. Why would “birth vs manufacture” be an acceptable differentiation between human and slave? Is it because we view non-human animals as raw resources, and therefore make the leap to “manufactured humans” as being equivalent to raw resources?
Some parents demonstrate this exact thinking when they treat their children as possessions, rather than as individuals (“I created you, therefore I can do whatever I want with/to you”). This shows us that even our own biological offspring aren’t automatically protected from potential abuse, enslavement, or death at the hands of those who feel some kind of superiority over them for an arbitrary reason (yes, it’s arbitrary to judge a child as inferior via the parent-child hierarchy). What would protect a manufactured human being from the same and worse?
During the writing of this article, a friend offered the following observation:
“With children, domesticated animals, and mentally challenged adults, complete self-determination and free agency can be dangerous to their welfare (and sometimes that of others). There’s a middle ground between freedom and slavery which might be called stewardship, where the well-meaning look after the vulnerable.”
While this is a great point, it is important to avoid infantilizing others as an excuse to lord power over them (something that has been utilized in attempts to justify slavery).
I’ve recently learned of an argument that states “Deckard could not have raped Rachael, because she was a replicant”. This is appalling and exactly the kind of evidence we can use to show how people already think about manufactured humans: such people believe that consent is not an issue for replicants. It makes me wonder what kind of mental gymnastics these same people might exert to excuse the rape of human women, the enslavement of other humans, and the abuse of non-human animals in the real world.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a human, an artificial person, a non-human animal, a robot, or anything else that is sentient. So long as it is sentient, the default action should be to grant that entity the right of self-determination and free agency, not to concoct an excuse to take advantage of, abuse, or kill it.
If humanity ever develops biotechnology as seen in Blade Runner, and if humanity hasn’t by then gotten its collective head out of its collective ass on the issue of respect for fellow sentient beings (regardless of appearance and origin), we can expect the Blade Runner films to become a prediction of humanity’s inevitable use of that biotechnology… and the inevitable enslavement of sentient beings created by us.
Culture changes very slowly. We have time before our biotechnology even begins to approach the ability to manufacture complete living beings or sentient machines. So, instead of passing around a mere meme, try asking the correct question(s) today. Start adapting your thinking and your culture, now, before fiction becomes fact.